Review: 'I Am Ali' ★★★

Absorbing new Muhammad Ali documentary makes shrewd use of rare audiotaped recordings Ali made at home.

Boyish, sing-songy yet serenely wise, the voice is the thing in the latest Muhammad Ali documentary, "I Am Ali." Director Clare Lewins, who has worked extensively in British television, became aware of audio recordings Ali made in the 1970s — homey, touching conversations with his daughter, Hana, among others, revealing a particularly loose and vulnerable side of a great American boxer at home. Lewins lobbied for a year to gain access to these tapes for her project.

They were worth the trouble. We first hear Ali in a brief 1979 excerpt, relaying his plans to get back in the ring. Young Hana sounds sad, worried. "Don't fight again. ... You're gettin' old!" she pleads. He chuckles.

Since his last fight, in 1981, Ali's legend hasn't eroded, exactly. But it has mutated into a past-tense legend, though Ali is very much alive and living in Scottsdale, Ariz. We see and hear nothing of the present-day Ali in "I Am Ali." But Lewins' use of the voice recordings and lovely home-movie footage creates a composite portrait of a complicated figure. The film itself, fond and intriguing, is by no means a hard-charging confrontation. Rather, Lewins' film is an affectionate series of memories, as recalled by Ali's family and associates.

Among the interview subjects: business manager Gene Kilroy; NFL star Jim Brown; photographer Carl Fischer, who posed Ali as a persecuted St. Sebastian for a famous cover of Esquire; and a genuine find, Russ Routledge, from Newcastle upon Tyne, self-described as "Ali's greatest fan." He got to know Ali in California, and his home-movie footage, taken from inside a car as Ali dealt with passers-by, says more than any 10 talking-heads segments could say.

Throughout various marriages and stages of fatherhood, before, during and after the Vietnam War to which he conscientiously objected, the man born Cassius Clay seized his opportunities and the public imagination. No world-class braggart, in any sport, ever did so much to back up his own myth. At its best, "I Am Ali" offers something the big-budget biopic "Ali" could not: casual intimacy. In those audiotaped chats, we hear a man, a father, in love with his kids, even if he was rarely around enough to prove that love in real time. Chronologically Ali's life is left a bit vague by director Lewins, but she's not going for completeness or conventional chronology. "So many films have been made about him, and I wanted this to be fresh," Lewins said in one recent interview. She got what she wanted.

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